The Logic of Love

From St. John of the Cross, in Dark Night of the Soul, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Batman:

It is a characteristic of the power and vehemence of love that all things seem possible to it, and it believes all men to be of the same mind as itself. For it thinks that there is naught wherein one may be employed, or which one may seek, save that which it seeks itself and that which it loves; and it believes that there is naught else to be desired, and naught wherein it may be employed, save that one thing, which is pursued by all.

Such is the logic of love, I guess, that it colors our perception of the world. What we love becomes the standard by which we measure everything we love less. That's why my dear mother didn't think (or at least didn't acknowledge) that I was a hopeless nerd as a child; if in fact I was a nerd, then the whole world ought aspire to the same nerdiness.

John of the Cross here refers to Mary Magdalene as a model of "the inebriating power and the boldness of love"--not words that traditionally evoke a cool, rational mind. And yet he suggests that Mary, in humiliating herself before a crowd by washing Jesus' feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, in frantically combing a cemetery for some sense of where Jesus may have been taken, comes closer than all of us to a true sense of how the universe is ordered. Love is totalizing, tyrannical even--a rebuke to the detachment that logic aspires to. It's under the logic of love that God's giving his only son to a world that was predisposed to killing God would make sense.

Of course, when love is so totalizing, it becomes all the more important that we know what we're loving and that we are sure it merits our love. It's one thing to think your kid merits the emulation of all other kids everywhere; it's quite another to think that of your music collection. There's an ethical quality to both our love and our logic. More often than not, however, we give love a pass and give logic our devotion. We often judge love by the extent to which we can call it logical. Instead maybe we should judge logic by the extent to which we can call it loving.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Seven

My friends on service projects in Iowa and Kentucky are almost done. Today is my last post in solidarity with them on these trips. You may be amused to learn that while posting this I realized that the Kentucky folks reading this entry this morning will read my misprint: "Jesus told his followers to be afraid." That sentence is missing a really important "not".

***

I was sitting in my office, listening to a local mainstream radio station, when singer Mindy Smith struck a chorus: “Worry not my daughters; worry not my sons. Child, when life don’t seem worth living, come to Jesus—let him hold you in his arms.” I turned up the volume in disbelief. This was what some Christians refer to as an “altar call”—right there on the radio, on a station not prone to altar calls. My coworker called me from his car: “Dude, turn on WXRT right now.” “Dude,” I responded, “I know.”

“Come to Jesus” is the simple sort of thing a young parent might sing to small children at bedtime, but it still shocks adults. “How bold!” “How awkward!” “How dare she?!?” Polite, civil conversation is meant to be ordinary: Should we talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government? But talk about Jesus can’t be ordinary, because Jesus and his claims on the world are undeniably extraordinary. Jesus regularly—almost predictably—takes people into turbulent waters of uncertainty and discomfort.

This week you’ve chosen to take the uncomfortable step of being publicly associated with Jesus. For a week you’ve been known as “the church group from Illinois.” You’ve worn shirts with references to Jesus on them. Everything you’ve done—from the public projects to the private group interactions at your home base—has been filtered through your association with Jesus. That can get intimidating; you can start to feel just a little bit like a freak.

You chose this life for a week, I’d like to suggest, in part because Jesus was beckoning you with one simple command that has directed the steps of his followers for millennia: “Come.” Sometimes that command comes from a need Jesus wants you to address: the extreme poverty of strangers, the desperate loneliness of acquaintances. But sometimes the command is for you alone, a challenge between you and Jesus to test the boundaries of your faithfulness—and his.

“Come,” Jesus once said to one of his earliest followers. They were both on a lake—Peter on a boat, Jesus on the water. Peter and his shipmates had more than one reason to be filled with fear: they were being tossed about by the waves and the wind, so that they weren’t confident they’d stay afloat; it was nighttime, with all the unidentifiable sounds and fill-in-the-blank anxieties that surface in the dark; and Jesus looked less like a Savior and more like a ghost.

Jesus told his followers not to be afraid, but sometimes you need a little assurance. So Peter gave him a dare: “Lord, if it’s you . . . tell me to come to you on the water.” And Jesus complied and said to him, “Come.”

“If you want to walk on water,” author John Ortberg writes, “you have to get out of the boat.” Sometimes—in order to remind ourselves that life with Jesus is not only good but extraordinary—we need to do some daring, outlandish things with our faith. Like spending a week in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable environment. Like inviting our friends into a conversation about God and eternity. Like befriending people who are embarrassing or difficult to befriend. Like walking on water during a nighttime storm.

If that’s what we want—a slightly more daring life—Jesus will take our dare. If that’s what we need—a faith more extraordinary than we’ve settled for to date—that’s where Jesus will dare us to come. So not just this week but whenever you’re willing, dare Jesus to dare you. You won’t believe where you’ll wind up.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Six

My friends in Iowa and Kentucky, doing good work on weeklong service projects, are nearing the end of their trips. I wrote this for the Kentucky folks; I'm posting it here as an act of solidarity.

***

Not everybody follows Jesus. Maybe that goes without saying, but it’s worth an occasional reminder. We inhabit a world that thinks that by and large it’s getting along just fine, thank you very much. All these Christian busybodies who can’t tie their shoes without asking God’s permission, who prefer to feel bad about things that make people feel good—these people are killing the world’s buzz, slowing down the world’s progress.

Not everybody follows Jesus, it’s true, but nearly everybody admires Jesus. It’s hard to find any unkind words said about him—apart from the occasional offhand comments that he didn’t actually exist. The overwhelming evidence is of course that he did exist, and that only good things can be said of him. Don’t blame Jesus for his followers, the saying goes; despite the various faults of his students, Jesus is still widely considered a Good Teacher.

Beyond that, a survey of the Gospels shows that Jesus wasn’t just admired but sought after as good company. People who threw parties wanted him there; students of the Bible sought private conversations with him about what the Bible meant. People who heard he was coming lined up to catch a look, and pressed in on him to shake his hand or make eye contact. People, it’s fair to say, wanted to be known by Jesus.

That’s not what Jesus wanted, however. Oh, he liked shaking hands and making eye contact and knowing people, and he did so almost constantly for three years. But what he really wanted was for people to move beyond mere acquaintance to true connection. He wanted people to see where he was headed and imagine themselves heading that same way. He wanted people to follow him, because he wanted them to arrive where he was going.

But not everybody follows Jesus, and Jesus is not afraid to confront their unspoken reasons.

To the man who made overtures of following him but who loved his beautiful house, Jesus suggested that to follow him necessarily meant leaving home.

To the man who loved being noticed by Jesus but who feared his own father’s jealous judgment, Jesus suggested that to follow him meant making hard decisions with difficult consequences.

To the man who wanted to leave his family for Jesus and leave Jesus for his family at the same time, Jesus suggested that following him—or anyone or anything for that matter—costs you something.

Following Jesus—even for a week—costs you something. Convenience, comfort, money, sweat, maybe blood, maybe health. But following Jesus gives you something in return as well. Elsewhere Jesus tells his followers “No one who has left”—and then he lists all sorts of things his followers have left behind—“for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life” (Luke 18:29).

Jesus isn’t a sadist: he asks you to follow him because he has good things in store for you. But following Jesus costs; you know that firsthand. That’s why not everybody follows Jesus—because the cost is there, and the benefit comes only by faith.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Five

My friends are in Kentucky and Iowa braving the heat and doing good things for people. I wrote the following as a morning meditation for my friends in Kentucky. I post it here as an act of solidarity.

***

A common feeling by this point in any trip is that coming when Jesus says “Come,” following wherever Jesus leads you, and sticking with Jesus as though your life depended on it, gets a little old.

We don’t feel like coming to Jesus with our anxieties and frustrations; we’d much rather sit with them a while, indulge them.

We’re tired of following Jesus into uncomfortable experiences and conversations; we’d rather be by ourselves, quite frankly, and we’d at least rather feel free to drop the “I’m so religious” façade that we’ve been lugging around with us.

And all this sticking with Jesus as though nothing else satisfies? Our minds fill with things we’ve had to live without for days now; our eyes wander toward things Jesus wouldn’t want us wandering toward.

Jesus is, quite frankly, wearing us out.

Yesterday Jesus freaked us out a little bit by inviting us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Today is different: Today Jesus employs a different metaphor, one from the garden. Jesus, he tells us, is like a vine; we, he tells us, are like that vine’s branches.

Christianity has always been an active faith. For twenty-one centuries Christians have run all over the world, talked to everyone they met, taken care of the sick, fed the hungry, all that stuff. Abiding with Jesus has tended to be understood in the context of coming to him and following him: we abide with Jesus while we’re on the move. But here’s Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, on the eve of his death, telling his followers that they are rooted, that they ought to rest in the reality of that rootedness.

Vines are not static; they keep growing and growing. Jesus is not suggesting to his disciples that they’ve gone as far as they’re going to go, that they’re finished coming where he bids them or following where he leads them. He is suggesting, however, that there is a sustaining, nurturing Source feeding continually into them. Whether we realize it or not, Jesus is continually nourishing us with nothing less than the love of God.

Vine branches do occasionally wither, but a good gardener recognizes the difference between an unhealthy branch and a healthy vine. In our case, the vine is fine; if we’re feeling burned out or used up, our first, best response is probably to remember to be loved.

So today, in the midst of your work, your conversations, your homesickness, your whatever, remember to be loved by God. Remember that, while it’s true we live in a world that too often neglects its own, too often turns a deaf ear to the real, desperate needs of people, too often uses one another up and then leaves them to fend for themselves—it’s also true that the God who created us loves us and abides in us. Rest in that when you need to, and draw on that when you remember to: we live and move and have our being—we abide—in the love of God.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Four

This week several of my friends are away on service trips. I wrote the following reflection on chapter six in the Gospel of John for some of them, to guide their devotional times for the day. I'm posting it here as an act of solidarity.

***

Abide is not as common a word as come or follow. As a verb we hardly ever hear it; the closest we come is the noun abode, which describes where we live, where we move—where we have our being, so to speak. But even old-fashioned words can be handled without too much inconvenience. We Google it or we phone a friend, and we figure it out and move on. It’s what tags alongside abide in Jesus’ words that starts to get a little freaky.

Christianity has occasionally been accused of cannibalism, for the most part due to a misunderstanding of communion: when we “eat his flesh and drink his blood” during a church service, we’re really eating bread and drinking juice, no matter what the eavesdroppers might think. But then we find Jesus saying these words and pointing not to bread and juice but to himself. If we want to be with Jesus—and that’s the only goal of coming and following him—then, he tells us, we’re going to have to consume him.

Jesus says these shocking things because he wants people to get what it means to have him among them. It’s not like having a dinner guest, who we make idle conversation with and treat politely before eventually dismissing them into the night and reclaiming sovereignty over our lives. It’s not even like having a family member who eventually grows up and moves out or who watches you grow up and move out or who eventually is parted from you by death. Jesus is, he’s saying here, more than all that. He’s our sustenance; he’s all we can truly, finally count on. Jesus is life. Jesus is it.

“What is it?” That’s what the Israelites said when they first found manna in the desert. That is, in fact, what manna is said to mean. God dropped manna on the Israelites—just enough every day—to sustain their years of wandering in the desert. Manna was God’s response to the Israelites’ paralyzing fear that they would die and disappear and be forgotten forever. That wasn’t what God wanted for them, and so every day they would wake up and find manna on the ground—just enough to get them through that day. Each night’s anxiety was replaced with each morning’s manna.

We are to consume Jesus in the way the Israelites consumed manna—in desperate faith that without Jesus we will come to nothing. We learn later in the Gospels that Jesus’ body is in fact broken like bread at a table—casually, almost unconsciously by people who don’t even know what they’ve got. His blood will be poured out like juice from a bottle by children who don’t even notice the mess they’ve made of things. And we find out later in the Gospels that no sooner has the world consumed Jesus, dispensed with him, than he shows up again, ready to sustain us for another day of our journey.

When we abide in Jesus, he also abides in us. We consume Jesus—he becomes the totality of our living, our moving, our being—but in a sense he consumes us as well, so that we become other than what we once were. It’s a little freaky, if you think about it, but it’s how—and where—we were meant to live. So when Jesus tells us to abide in him, he’s really saying what the God of the Israelites, who sustained them in the desert, said to them: “Choose life!” That’s it.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Three

I have friends on two different service projects at the same time: in impoverished Appalachia, and in flood-devastated Iowa. I wrote some devotional readings for the Appalachia trip, and I'm posting them here as an act of solidarity for them. Here's day three.

***

Christianity has always been ambitious. From the first public sermon of Jesus’ first disciple, Peter, to the televised campaigns of people like Billy Graham, Christians have stepped in front of crowds and made bold claims: Jesus is God, Jesus died for your sins, Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus is coming back, Jesus wants you in his kingdom. Christianity—at its best—has never hid from the world; rather, Christians have—at their best—demanded that the world notice and respond to the bold claims of Jesus.

This tradition of going out into the world, of inviting people into the family of God, begins with Jesus himself. Having just endured forty days of testing by the devil in the desert, having just learned of the death of his cousin and forerunner John the Baptist, Jesus went out into the world to invite people into his family. And he began with a couple of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee.

Now, in the days of Jesus, going around talking about God was not all that unusual. Rabbis were often itinerant—many would travel from town to town, teaching the people theology, debating other religious scholars and living off the hospitality of the townspeople. They would recruit disciples as they traveled; to follow a rabbi was a privilege reserved for the best and brightest.

What following a rabbi didn’t entail was fishing—for fish or for men. Rabbis were building schools; they wanted good students who would eventually graduate and become rabbis themselves. Jesus approached discipleship differently. He wasn’t populating a school but a kingdom, with God the Father as king and himself as prince. No wonder the best and the brightest weren’t lining up to follow him.

“Follow me,” the lonely rabbi with no school said to modest fishermen with nothing to commend them to discipleship, “and I will make you fishers of men.” And they dropped their nets and went fishing.

The world was meant to be Jesus’ kingdom. Until Jesus is set at the center of creation and God sits on the throne of the world—until his kingdom is established—the world will continue to suffer its kingless, uncentered existence. Jesus didn’t say as much, but those two fishermen somehow figured it out. And instead of chasing an ambitious dream of becoming rabbis themselves, they followed Jesus to the ends of the earth, inviting everyone they met to drop their nets.

The place you find yourself today is likely beautiful in its own way, but like other beautiful places, it also shows evidence of a world that isn’t working right. That’s why Jesus invited you to follow him here: The people you meet, like the people of every culture and every age, need to hear the good news that Jesus is God, that Jesus died for their sins, that Jesus rose from the dead, that Jesus is coming back, that Jesus wants them in his kingdom. If you really follow Jesus, you’ll hear that very good news coming out of your own mouth.

Come, Follow, Abide--Day Two

It's the second day of our church's service trip to Appalachia, and of my friend's youth trip to flood-ravaged eastern Iowa, which got hit with two major storms this weekend, including one just last night. I wrote devotions for the Appalachia trip, and as I look at them it strikes me that they have application to those of us who stay at home, as well. I'm posting them here, if nothing else, as an act of solidarity. Almost literally the least I can do.

***

“Come see the amazing bearded lady!” “Come see the unbelievable wolf-boy!” They holler as you walk past, with all the urgency they can usher up. The carnival barker is concerned for your soul: your life will never be complete without seeing a person contort herself into a three-foot-by-three-foot box.

I find it hard to imagine Jesus hollering. For whatever reason—maybe because he looks so serene in all the pictures—Jesus strikes me as generally quiet. And yet here he is in John 1, whispering a phrase that sounds suspiciously like the loud appeal of the huckster at the circus: "Come . . . and you will see." Why should we believe this Jesus?

John 1 is one of the Bible’s busiest chapters. In it the author links Jesus’ life to the original act of creation: “In the beginning . . .” Jesus is, according to this Gospel, that important. And yet as soon as the author sets up this portrait of Jesus as God himself, he switches camera angles to focus on John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and predecessor in the role of religious upstart. Not knowing what to make of his wild ways and dire predictions, onlookers wonder out loud if John is the promised Savior of God’s people. He quickly tells them no and instead points them to Jesus.

John’s disciples can take a hint, so they start following Jesus around. To this point, Jesus has been seemingly minding his own business, but now he asks them what they want.

How do you react when someone you admire, someone you’re intrigued by, asks what you want? You don’t necessarily know; you just want to hang around, to see what will happen, to get inside their head. You don’t know what you want; you just know you don’t want to give up this obsession too quickly.

So these awkward would-be disciples ask Jesus their own question, one that doesn’t really matter. “Where are you staying?” To which Jesus responds, “Come . . . and you will see.”

Jesus, it turns out, isn’t staying anywhere. He’s on the move, and to come to him is actually to go with him on what turns out to be an amazing adventure. Before these disciples know it, they’re issuing the same command to their friends and acquaintances that Jesus just whispered to them: “Come and see.”

Coming on a trip to serve people far from your home is an act of discipleship. You may not even know exactly why you came, but here you are, and Jesus, it turns out, is your guide. As you make your way through this week, keep your eyes open, because Jesus brought you here to show you something: about yourself, about him, about the world we find ourselves staying in. For this week at least, this is where you belong, because Jesus, we believe, is God, and this is what God wants you to see.